Interesting Facts about Christmas

Christmas is an annual commemoration of the birth of Jesus Christ, celebrated generally on December 25 as a religious and cultural holiday by billions of people around the world. How Much do you know about it? If you want to know more about it, You are at right place then. So, Here are some interesting facts about our favorite festival :

1. Did you ever wonder from where X-mas came from? Actually, X is Greek symbol for Christ so to shorten it up, we usually use X-mas.

2. Christmas trees were first decorated with foods such as apples, nuts and dates.

Depiction of Early Christmas Trees

3. In the 18th century Christmas trees began being decorated with candles.

4. Electric Christmas tree lights were first used in 1895.

5.Did you know that giving presents were once banned by the Catholic Church. It was believed that gift giving was connected to paganism.

6. The twelve days of Christmas are the
days between Christmas Day and Epiphany (6th of January) and represent
the length of time it took for the wise men from the East to visit the
manger of Jesus after his birth.

7.The song Jingle Bells was written by James Pierpont in 1857. It was originally called “One Horse Open Sleigh” and was made for Thanksgiving.

8. There are two islands named Christmas. Christmas Island (formerly Kiritimati) in the Pacific Ocean and Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean.

9. The tallest Christmas tree ever displayed was in Seattle Washington in 1950. The Christmas tree was 221 feet tall!

10.Santa Claus is also known as St. Nicholas, Father Christmas, Grandfather Frost and Kris Kringle.

11.There are 3 towns in the Us that are named Santa Claus. One in Georgia, one in Arizona and one in Indiana.

12. The French gave the biggest Christmas present ever in 1886. It was the Statue of Liberty, and they gave it to the United States of America. (The French have one too, a smaller one, in Paris.)

Santa Claus

13.Santa Claus was a real Saint. He lived in Myra in the 300s. Myra is in what’s now Turkey. The German name for Saint Nicholas is Sankt Niklaus.

14. The first artificial Christmas Tree wasn’t a tree at all. It was created out of goose feathers that were dyed.

15. The Candy Cane is one of the most familiar symbols of Christmas. It dates back to 1670 in Europe but didn’t appear in the U.S. until the 1800s. The treat we see today, where the shape is Jesus’s hook to shepherd his lambs and the color and stripes hold significance for purity and Christ’s sacrifice, became common in the mid 1900s.

16. The first Christmas card was designed in 1843 by J.C. Horsley.

17. US scientists calculated that Santa would have to visit more than 822 homes a
second to deliver all the world's presents on Christmas Eve, travelling
at 650 miles a second.

Modern Day Christmas Tree

18. Christmas trees become popular in the
UK from 1841 when Prince Albert erected a tree in Windsor Castle
following a German tradition.

19. "Jingle Bells" was the first song broadcast from space when Gemini 6
astronauts Tom Stafford and Wally Schirra sang it on December 16, 1965.

20. Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer was invented for a US firm's Christmas promotion in 1938.

21. Early in their history, Christmas lights were so expensive that they were more commonly rented than sold.

22. In 1836, Alabama became the first state in the USA to declare Christmas a legal holiday.

23. The word Christmas comes from Cristes
maesse, or "Christ's Mass." There is no set date for his birth in
scripture and it wasn't celebrated on any particular day. However
Christmas was first celebrated on the 25th of December in Rome in 336AD

24. The
typical image we have of Santa Claus dressed in red clothes with white
fur trim, is an amalgamation of cultural input over many years.

25. Gold-wrapped chocolate coins commemorate St Nicholas who gave bags of gold coins to the poor.